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Fantasy UI

pushing-pixels.org

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Re: Fantasy UI

#81

Post by loceng »

krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

Do you have experience creating "fantasy" UIs? Basic UX/UI skills won't transfer over, you'd need additional skillsets and an eye for it.

Complex-tight layouts will feel cluttered to people who have more difficulty with differentiation, visually processing contrast - or aren't motivated/driven/interested to understand what they're looking at. If you can expect the audience who needs to learn the interface will be motivated to learn it, then it can work.

I've had similar desire to see higher quality, more complex "fantasy" UIs and I could see parts of projects benefitting from such an interface - however I'm a long way off from having the funding and experimental budget to move in that direction. Maybe I'll be blessed enough that it can happen in 5 years.

Re: Fantasy UI

#82

Post by bmn__ »

afavour wrote: post #63
protomyth wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused how a person can play a 3D video game with just a keyboard, but a website is beyond control? I don't think a car is a good comparison as it is in 3D space unlike a website.

Because there’s a very small defined set of actions a person can take in such games: backwards, forwards, left, right, etc. By comparison pages have dozens of links, form fields, menus, etc. It’s not that they can’t be navigated with the keyboard alone, it’s that it’s rarely the most efficient way of doing it. Clicking a link will always be quicker than pressing tab X number of times to select it.

> pressing tab X number of times

You seem to be under the impression that Netscape style navigation is the best a keyboard can do, which makes the argument an involuntary strawman.

Spatial navigation and caret navigation blow a pointing device out of the water.

Re: Fantasy UI

#83

Post by ComputerGuru »

krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

> We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science. There are arguments for both sides.

It was turned into a literal science by Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft (through the 90s) that involved actual study of the human body, perception, haptics, material science, light, psychology, human biases and preconceptions, holistic purpose, advances in micro mechanical engineering, usability studies, panel testing, and actual research (for just one example out of thousands, read the story behind the creation of the trackpoint [0]). Then different types of people wearing different hats became involved in the decision making process and the target consumer base shifted in a certain direction and “science” didn’t cut it any more.

Modern UI/UX is absolutely not driven by any science apart from sales conversion rates.

[0]: https://archive.is/S4ESh

Re: Fantasy UI

#84

Post by dukeofdoom »

I'm looking for alien/space looking UI interface. And music visualizers for my youtube video projects.

I've been compiling visually interesting/fantasy computer animations for youtube videos made with pygame.

So far I've found

1. Matrix Effect

https://gist.github.com/MrKioZ/c07b9377d20bab53af6ebcdfbdeab...

2. Star Field effect

https://codeboje.de/starfields-and-galaxies-python/

3. Earth Animation

https://makersportal.com/blog/2018/8/16/rotating-globe-in-py...

Re: Fantasy UI

#85

Post by noodles_nomore »

neilalexander wrote: post #58

If you haven’t seen them, look at the Microsoft Future Vision concepts for some quite interesting ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tFdreZB94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 To me, what makes these fantasy UIs compelling is that they are usually extremely context-aware and content-aware. We haven’t quite worked out how to make real world computers work that way yet. We’re still very much tied to pa…

Surprisingly hollow. There is almost no information on the screens to indicate what any swipe or touch might do. Explains a lot about their decisions in Windows 8/10. Their ideal is magic bullshit.

Re: Fantasy UI

#86

Post by natchy »

krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

I think it’s mostly that they are on a dark background honestly.

Imagine what a non programmer thinks when they see a programmers dark text editor. Thats the same feeling most people get when they see data viz on a dark BG since it’s so uncommon.

Re: Fantasy UI

#87

Post by 627467 »

tucosan wrote: post #64
pc86 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).

I navigate the web mostly via keyboard. Vimium [1] is the First Plugin I install on every desktop browser. The car analogy makes little sense. [1]: https://vimium.github.io

Heard of it before but you comment made me actually see vimium in action. It seems like a potential tool for me! Thank you.

I'm intrigued because navigating this way makes UI much closer to a touchscreen experience: there's no mouseover, mouseout, focus states.

Re: Fantasy UI

#88

Post by coldtea »

tel wrote: post #77
coldtea wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science. In the realm of VST/AU plugins (virtual music instruments and effects), the art of interface building is alive and kicking, and the different interfaces add (a) to the excitement, (b) to be able to differentiate quickly among dozens (or 100s) of different plugins you use, (c) helps test/create novel interaction ideas... Here are example VS…

I was thinking VSTs as well. It's kind of funny, I truly dislike the UI of most VSTs I use. Cluttered, hard to understand, many hidden features and menus, and often rampant unhelpful skeuomorphism. But also there are a few which are remarkable: the 3 synths from Madrona labs, the prosaic and convenient UI from Valhalla's plugins, up to the complex patchbay interface of something like VCV Rack, for instance. VSTs bala…

>and often rampant unhelpful skeuomorphism.

That's the best part of it. They work like hardware, which if you get serious, you often end up buying and using as well, which means studio musicians immediately know what they do, computer musicians get to learn how hardware units works, and the designs are nice and life-like.

The bad about skeuomorphism is not looking like a hardware unit, but being restricted to interacting like it's a hardware unit.

Which is not the case in most skeuomorphic VSTs - you have all kinds of computer-only interactions to make your life easier (double-click to reset knobs, preset search, A/B comparison, draw curves, etc).

Skeuomorphism there is just the cherry on top, not a rotten core, like the skeuomorphic DVD player programs of yore.

Re: Fantasy UI

#89

Post by treis »

kls wrote: post #67
afavour wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is keyboard use the pinnacle of UI? Pretty much every device has some kind of mouse-like device attached to it, and trackpads with good scrolling (e.g. Apple ones) are a wonderfully intuitive way to control movement. I get that HN likes using the keyboard for stuff like terminals, I do too. But web pages aren’t terminal applications.

I was with a fortune 10 company as a tech executive, we had an effort to move all of the call center technology over to web based technologies in a modernization effort. The call center lost over 15 million dollars in revenue in the first week when we moved from the old UNIX terminal app to the web UI, after an extensive study it was deemed the issue was loss of speed due to lack of keyboard shortcuts and navigation.…

I do this for a living and I am constantly amazed at the amount of money we are paid to make things worse. Of course we add in things like chat, email, and other channels but the day to day experience of the users usually gets a lot worse.

The systems we put in are easier to use and have more controls around who can do what. It makes the users more interchangeable and cuts training time. The cost of that is the top speed that users can get stuff done is drastically reduced.

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